January 28, 2013

The Social Construction of Stuff

I am in the process of moving to a new home. The move has
been planned for over a year, so I have been preparing to pack and get rid of
things for a while. Coincidentally, our department recently moved to a new
building and a family member is in the process of moving too, so I have had
many chances to pack, unpack, and reflect.

Moving reminds me of the meanings we assign to our stuff.
According to sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, we socially
construct meaning of reality. We don’t just construct these meanings
individually, but socially as well. These meanings become habitual and part of
our social institutions, reinforcing the meanings that we collectively create
about our social world and ultimately our realities.

Take my high school letterman jacket, for instance. It had
great meaning to me at the time, and wearing it represented my school and my
personal accomplishments. As a coat it’s actually kind of warm and comfortable
too.

But it has a completely different meaning now years (and
years) after graduation. It might signify other meanings, like:

Wow, she’s really stuck in the past!

Isn’t she too old to be wearing a high
schooler’s coat?

She graduated a really long time ago.

Can’t she afford a newer coat?

I recently saw a man many years older than I am wearing his
high school letterman jacket in a store. I thought it was kind of a cool thing for him
to wear, so I have been going back and forth. Should I keep the coat as a
memento, since it once had great meaning, maybe wear it on Halloween
sometime as a joke, or just give it away? But it has my name, my school, my
accomplishments, and my year of graduation on it. Isn’t it part of my identity?
Or is it just something taking up space in a closet?

Other bits of stuff also gave me pause about throwing out.
My SAT and ACT scores, once so
important to have on file now seem irrelevant.
Wouldn’t they be interesting artifacts to keep, milestones of the
past? These bits of paper are socially defined as important, but are they
really part of who I am—or even who I was? (Something to think about for those
of you who might still view your SAT scores as a central defining marker of
your ability and worth.)

Then there were piles of papers I wrote in high school,
which I often put great care into, even presenting them in special folders. Written in
the age before there was easy access to personal computers, they are the sole
copies of what once consumed my attention for weeks at a time. They mattered a
lot then, symbolic of my passage through the educational system in order to
earn credentials to help me advance to the next level. And as I
wrote about recently, these papers also had meaning beyond the grades I
earned; some are on subjects I still find interesting.

I admit that seeing old graded papers stung a bit if the
grades were lower than I’d hoped, reflecting the continued meaning of both the
paper itself and the symbolic meaning it represented. Throwing them away felt
like getting rid of part of my past, at once liberating but also difficult. I
worked hard
on those papers, and now they would be gone forever. The only time
I looked at the papers was when I moved before, figuring that since they were
once important they would be worth saving. But it was time for them to go.

Cleaning and packing gave me a renewed understanding of
people who hoard things. As
I wrote about a few years ago, hoarding is related to our society’s
emphasis on consumption and accumulating things that we might not need. But
hoarding is about more than just consuming, it is about meaning-making. Stuff becomes
imbued with so much meaning—even stuff that is clearly garbage to others—that
it becomes difficult to throw away. It may feel like throwing away part of the
past, or even part of the self.

I thought about this as I went through the Hello Kitty stuff
I treasured so much as an 8-year-old, the patches I earned swimming and
ice-skating, the rubber stamp I found which reminded me how I liked office
supplies for some reason as a kid. All of these things triggered memories of
the past, but really just took up space in boxes today.

Of course not all will be thrown away. I’ll keep my cap and
tassel I wore at my high school graduation. My old tennis racket has made me
think about taking up the sport again.

Our stuff serves as physical manifestations of the many
socially constructed realities we create in our society. These meanings
encourage us to hold on to some things that we might not have emotional meaning
for us (like tax-related documents, for instance), but then again the socially
ascribed meanings might make it difficult for us to let go.

Comments

I think social constructs derive from the ego. You relayed a perfect example of assuming or constructing what others think with the example of the coat. However, don't you feel that these constructs could be something more of a positive? For example, they may be thinking she graduated a long time ago, but they also may be thinking, good for her for getting a degree, or wow she looks good in that coat. Others may identify with and likewise have a sense of nostalgia. The constructs we form and the emotional attachments we associate with an object can bring comfort, a sense of accomplishment, or gratitude. Keep the coat.